


Knight of Roses

by disasterhawke



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Romance, Disaster Hawke, Dragon Age: Inquisition Quest - Here Lies the Abyss, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotions, F/M, Hawke (Dragon Age) Lives, Hawke in Dragon Age: Inquisition, Hurt/Comfort, Not Very Established Relationship, Purple Hawke (Dragon Age), Recovery, Resolved Sexual Tension, Reunions, Sacrifical Hawke, The Fade, Time Skips, Warden (Dragon Age) Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 09:04:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20832896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disasterhawke/pseuds/disasterhawke
Summary: Faced with letting Alistair Theirin die, trapping the last hope of Thedas in the Fade, or getting the damn thing done herself, Marian Hawke isn't going to let anything but the third option happen. Inquisitor Lavellan agrees, and Hawke charges a spider twenty times her size, fully expecting to die in the process.The only thing is, her sacrifice play...well, it doesn't come out all that sacrificial. Because Hawke makes it out of the Fade. Eventually, anyway. And now she's got a lot more problems than a giant spider.





	Knight of Roses

“Say goodbye to Varric for me, won’t you?”

If she’s brutally honest with herself, Hawke has always expected to die doing something monumentally stupid. Something so ridiculous that even Isabela would look at her and say _ no, sweet thing, really? _

So when their impromptu trip to the Fade comes down to someone dying, Hawke is certain as all hell that she isn’t going to let Alistair do it. Bethany will find some way to hike to the Maker’s side and kill her. No matter who she has to kill, Hawke won’t let _ him _make the sacrifice play. The Inquisitor and his friends are pretty tough, but Hawke once fought off seven qunari spearmen alone. With a butter knife.

Well, she had her daggers, but when Varric tells it, it’s just a butter knife.

There’s not a lot of time for thoughts to fly through Hawke’s head as she charges into battle with a spider so large she barely comes up to its knuckle. One manages anyway. _ How are you going to spin this one, Varric? _

At least it’ll be a quick death, like Carver got.

There’s only one problem.

Hawke doesn’t die.

Because on instinct, she plucks smoke powder from the pouch at her belt, activating it to conceal her escape from its flailing limbs. And the Nightmare - the Nightmare _ cannot find her. _She crouches hidden behind rocks, daggers pressed against her thighs, muting the flow of spider ichor from their blades. Alistair and the Inquisitor are long gone. This stupid move of hers has worked. All she needs to do…

All she needs to do is find another way out. And the world, right now, is full of holes. Rifts.

Hawke rocks forward. Gets ready. Sneaks away from the demon that is trying to kill her. _ The stupid thing, _ she thinks to herself, _ is how easy that was. _

\---

In the Fade, time isn't really a thing. So Hawke is spared the knowledge of just how long it takes her to find a way out. She starts to measure it in other ways, instead. It's long enough for her to get so thirsty she drinks potions to try and quench it. To get so hungry that she eats the mabari treats in her satchel.

In the back of her mind, she can hear Bethany saying, _ bad enough that I’m marrying a Ferelden dog lord, now I’ve got to have one for a sister too? _

She emerges into darkness, into a desert that she doesn’t recognise, because who would recognise a fucking desert on sight. There are lights in the distance, but more troubling is the faint movement she can see on the crest of the sand dune - because the rifts let demons through, too.

But she’s out. She’s out. She isn’t dead. Yet, at least. The lack of water might get her now, and wouldn’t that be a great death for Varric to immortalise in text. Would he spin it in a gritty, dark manner, like _ Hard in Hightown? _Or would he go for epic again, like in the book he wrote about her, the book she and Bethany read aloud for hours until their sides hurt from laughing.

The sound of her sister’s giggles, though only in her head, sustain Hawke as she crawls and sneaks and clambers her way through the mystery desert. There are scrub bushes and phoenixes and ruins and - wait. She knows those ruins.

Fuck.

She’s in the fucking Western Approach. She’s barely gone anywhere.

Hawke lets out a crow of joy and, naturally, attracts the attention of three quillbacks. She takes out one easily by getting the drop on it, but the other two are harder to manage - she throws down her last trap, but they both sidestep it, and bugger her if the sand isn’t going to fuck the mechanism up.

One of them she manages to take out in a flurry of blows, but the second one makes its charge into her side, painfully scraping over her - most of it will be bruises, her armour’s good enough, but some of its spines are thin enough to slip through the cracks. She plunges her dagger right into the base of its neck, severing its spine, but blood is trickling from her side.

And she drank her Maker damned sodding healing potions when she ran out of water.

There’s an Inquisition outpost here. A huge one. What did Inqy call it? It was something Warden related. She’s got to find that, and if she finds that, she can get somewhere safe. She can get to Varric. Same thing, really.

She just has to do it before she bleeds out. Simple, right?

\---

“We found her trying to climb the walls, Knight-Captain. She looks injured.”

“Andraste’s blade, recruit. Don’t you know who this is? Maker, Champion, you’re supposed to be dead. We held your funeral.”

Hawke is relatively sure she’s not dead. If she was dead, she wouldn’t be looking into the face of a templar, and her side wouldn’t hurt so very much. She grins lopsidedly at Rylen. That’s his name. She knocked him out whilst sneaking out of Kirkwall the last time. The glare dipping his brow shows he knows.

“I’ve never been great at doing what I’m supposed to,” Hawke rasps, pressing her hands to her side. “But if you don’t get me a healer, that’s going to change.”

She’s brought to a bed in the fortress that smells of stale sweat. A surgeon appears, clucking over the amount of sand she’s gotten in her wounds, and strips Hawke of her armour. The process of cleaning the four cuts along her side is not pleasant. The pain is nice, though. The pain reminds her that she’s alive.

Right?

“What’s your name?” she asks, when the surgeon has his fingers pressed deep into her side to test what the cuts managed to hit.

“Aren, ser.”

Hawke rolls her eyes. “You’re finger fucking my liver, Aren, don’t ser me right now.”

“I, ah…”

“I need you to tell me something I don’t know.”

He pulls his fingers away and begins cleaning his hands. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“You’ll know if I’m making a joke. You’ll be laughing.” She grits her teeth. “I’m serious. I need you to tell me something I don’t know. The more random the better. Anything. Please.”

“Poultices are only effective if warmed before application,” Aren says, frowning, “but if heated too greatly, their healing properties will be neutralised.”

Hawke laughs, brokenly and hoarsely. “Good. Great. There’s absolutely no bloody reason that a demon would be able to rattle that off. Thanks.”

His expression softens then, and he presses a hand to her shoulder. “This is not the Fade, Champion. I promise you that.”

“How’d you know I was in the Fade?”

“We all heard the story. Inquisitor Lavellan is alive because of you. He wouldn’t have been able to save the whole damned world if you hadn’t guarded his back. You’re a bloody hero.”

Hawke winces, but not at the compliment. “Was it a good story?” she asks quietly, as he reaches for needle and thread and begins to sew up her lacerations.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s alright. You’re not meant to.” He’s sewn up three and a half of her cuts before Hawke thinks to say, “Wait. The world? How long has it been, since the siege at Adamant?”

“Eight months.”

She’s stronger than him, so when she leaps out of the bed Hawke sends Aren flying from his stool, threaded needle dangling from her abdomen. “Fuck. Fuckity fuck shit balls arse damnit.”

“We’re not done here, Champion,” Aren says in the sort of voice that Bethany uses on her when she’s at her worst.

Bethany.

Shit.

“Get me the Knight-Captain. And one of Leliana’s birds. And paper. _ Now.” _

\---

_ Champion, _

_ You are fortunate that I am more willing to accept the impossible than I have been in the past. I appreciate the lengths to which you went to prove your identity, but in the future I would prefer not to be reminded of precisely what your brother-in-law sounds like at intimate moments. There was enough of that with the Hero. _

_ I have kept news of your miraculous survival quiet, though I have not hidden it from the Inquisitor. Although I intercepted the Knight-Captain's initial message to him, I believe it is better that he be aware. _

_ Now, to your questions. _

_ Varric is in Kirkwall. He is living in your old estate, and helping to rebuild the city. If he is not careful, they will start calling for him to take the Viscount's seat. _

_ Both your sister and her husband are in Weisshaupt. They have taken the positions of Warden-Commander for the Free Marches and Ferelden respectively. _

_ If you wish my opinion - go to them first. _

_ The Inquisitor would like to see you as well, but I have informed him that he will need to get in line. You are welcome at Skyhold whenever you wish. _

_ Leliana _

\---

The journey to the Anderfels is long, even with the pair of horses Rylen gives her. It gives time for Hawke's mind to run away with itself. For her to think too much.

Sebastian had once asked her why she was so quick to make everything a joke. She'd told him the truth: it's the only way she can survive this world. This world has killed her brother, her mother, her father; made her kill someone she thought was her friend. Made her fight multiple wars to protect the home that was the one shining light in her life. The place that had finally made her feel safe.

She misses the city. Misses the looming buildings and dark alleys. Misses the mountains that you could escape to in half a day's walk. The sense of freedom and possibility. Maker's tits, she even misses the stench of Darktown. The snotty nobles who glared at her for walking through Hightown in bloodied leather armour.

Her armour, her champion's armour, is gone. The material deteriorated in the Fade, Aren said, even before he cut it off her. She's got a new set, a short jacket with long tails over a bodice that Isabela would have worn without a shirt. There's a long band of cloth that wraps around her waist half a dozen times, disguising her bandages. The colours are neutral and dark; she's over the champion red. If she's going to get a second chance at life, she's not spending it as someone else's figurehead.

It proves useful. With new clothes and hair that's desperately in need of cutting, no one at Weisshaupt recognises her.

"Message from the Inquisitor," Hawke says, doffing the hat she accepted only because it makes her look even less like herself. "For the Commander of the Grey."

"Which one?"

"Oh, sorry. Forgot it's a party right now. Ferelden. I'm to put it in his hands myself, the Inquisitor says."

The Warden nods, and has her horses taken away to be rubbed down. "Must be important if it's come by hand. Most of his stuff gets here by bird."

"Bugger me if I know what it is," Hawke lies. The letter she's holding as supposed proof is Leliana's. _ She's _ the important message, not the paper. "Pays well though."

Weisshaupt is fuller than Hawke remembers it - they must've pulled everyone back here after Corypheus died. The false calling is gone, Rylen said, but it's no wonder they want to huddle together for a while. She can't blame them. Even without her flaming soft spot for Wardens. Bethany had once told her that getting the Blight was the best thing that ever happened to her. Hawke hadn't understood until she'd stayed with her and Alistair and the rest of the Wardens. They were a family, like Hawke's own group of misfits.

"He's just in this office here. I'll leave you to it."

"Thanks," Hawke says, and turns to look at the closed door.

_ Here we go, then. _

\---

Hawke will later insist that the only reason Alistair gets his sword to her throat is that she doesn't expect it of him.

"Hello to you too," she says, holding her hands up and raising an eyebrow as her hat tumbles to the ground.

Alistair grimaces, and presses the edge of his sword against her throat. "Get her voice out of your mouth, demon," he growls.

"You know, you really need to sharpen your sword. If I did that with my daggers the person would be dead already. It's me. Put it down."

"You are _ dead, _ Hawke. I watched you charge the Nightmare alone. We _ left you." _

"Bethany has a mole on her left shoulder. She thinks the mole is cute, but she plucks the really thick hairs that grow out of it. Carver used to call it her mabari spot."

Three seconds pass. Hawke counts them.

Then, in a single flurry of movement, Alistair sheathes his sword and pulls her into a fierce, shaking hug. Face pressed to his shoulder, Hawke holds on tightly, letting out the breath it feels like she's been holding since she left the Keep.

"Never," he says, pulling back and holding her by the shoulders, "do that again."

"Fake die?"

"Sacrifice yourself for me."

Hawke grins lopsidedly. "Fat chance, little brother."

"Oh!" Alistair says, doing the sheepish blushing thing that Bethany adores and Hawke thinks is ridiculous. "You heard."

"Leliana told me. Sorry I missed it. I got here as fast as I could, but the Fade doesn't really give a shit about the concept of linear time."

"Bethany is going to kill you."

Hawke's face crumples, and she looks down. "I got here as fast as I could," she says again, the words coming out softer this time.

"Are you alright?"

"Honestly," she says, running both hands through her hair and counting how many seconds it takes her to do it, "I've got no idea."

\---

They agree not to tell Bethany by having her just walk into the room, because neither of them fancy having to explain why Weisshaupt is burning. Hawke stays in Alistair's office, drinking the whisky he probably thought was well hidden in his desk, and eating the cheese he hadn't even tried to hide.

Seven minutes and twenty three seconds later, the door slams open and her sister charges in.

"You changed your hair," Hawke says, holding up her piece of Ferelden sharp cheddar. "It suits you."

Bethany's reply isn't shouted so much as screamed. "You ridiculous arse!"

"Hey, that's my cheese."

"Sod your cheese, that's my _ sister." _

This time it's Hawke who leaps across the room, sweeping her feet from atop Alistair's desk and picking Bethany up, spinning her round. No one mentions that her laughter, when she drops Bethany to the ground and holds onto her instead, turns much more like sobs.

"Oh, Marian," Bethany sighs, "your breath stinks. Did you eat the Orlesian blue as well?"

"I would've thought you'd be used to the smell by now."

"No one can get used to that smell, sis. Come on. Come to our rooms, you look exhausted. We'll get you all caught up."

Hawke grins and plucks the whisky bottle from behind her, amidst Alistair's protests. "Caught up? I want a whole bloody reenactment of your wedding."

\---

On the third week in Weisshaupt, Hawke manages to admit to herself that she might just be avoiding going to Kirkwall.

It's not because she's a coward, or because she doesn't want to go. She's scared of very little these days, and she still has an ache in her chest that won't be soothed by anything other than the sight of paved streets and a mugging or two.

It's because of something Bethany says, the night she arrives in the fortress.

"It broke him. Things got worse after that, too. I'm not sure he's the same anymore."

The ache in her chest might not be shaped like a city.

It might be shaped like the fact that she wasn't here for Varric when it turned out that the woman he loved despite everything had done something he couldn't excuse. Like not being at his side when they faced the magister she freed. Like not being there with him now, fixing the city that their friend broke.

It takes all three of those weeks for Hawke to realise she can fix one of those things. All it will cost is admitting that Varric is the last remaining thing in the world that she's scared of.

"Alright," Alistair says, flopping into the seat beside her. "What is it?"

"Mmph?"

"You drink a lot, Hawke, but you only drink this much when you're stewing over something. And I for one would like to avoid having to explain to the First Warden why the liquor cabinet is entirely empty, so perhaps you need to try, oh, I don't know, talking about it?"

Hawke looks at him with baleful, red rimmed eyes. "Fuck you."

"He's right, sis. The last time you drank this much was when Anders died." Bethany sits down on the floor in front of her, resting her arm on Alistair's knee.

"Died is so impersonal," Hawke drawls, looking up at the ceiling. "I prefer _ betrayed everyone by murdering dozens of innocent people and got the knife to the throat that he fucking well deserved." _

"Bit wordy," Alistair points out.

One minute, twenty four seconds.

She counts them carefully, precisely, not missing a single one, watching to make sure that the world is still going on around her. That things are changing. That she isn’t in the Fade again.

"The world doesn't make sense without Varric."

"Oh," sighs Bethany. "You should go."

Hawke snorts a laugh. "I should have gone two weeks ago."

"Why haven't you?"

"I…"

Alistair reaches over to rub her back consolingly, but Bethany sits straight up, pulling her legs under her to kneel attentively.

"Fuck," Bethany says, sounding more like Carver than she has in years. "You're in love with him. With Varric. You are. Aren't you?"

For almost a decade, since that fucking dwarf shot her pickpocket with a crossbow bolt, Hawke has been very, very careful to keep certain thoughts out of her mind. It didn't take a genius to realise that she wasn't Varric's type, and the more she found out about him, the more certain she was that some things should never, ever be thought.

Of course, the world had challenged that.

There was the game of Wicked Grace where she'd actually managed to get ahead of both Varric and Isabela. He card counted, and Isabela hid false cards in her knickers. That night, Hawke did both - though her cards were stuck under the table, not in her underwear.

By the fourth hand, she was wearing Varric's shirt and they'd poured two pints of shitty Hanged Man ale over him. His shirt smelled of him, the scent she remembered too clearly from nights huddled together in the Deep Roads, and she couldn't stop looking at the hair that had come loose around his face, that was stuck to his skin by the sticky drink.

Just like then, Hawke takes a deep breath and wills herself not to let a single thought pass through her mind.

It doesn't work this time, not even when she keeps taking deep breaths for two minutes and seventeen seconds.

She gives up, downs the rest of the bottle of whisky and says, "Yeah."

"You know, sister," Alistair says, two hours and eight minutes and four seconds later, when they're helping her to her bed, "it's very unsettling when you tell the truth."

Hawke agrees.

\---

She’s methodical about her preparations for leaving. It’s the first time she ever has been, and the last time she ever will be, and Bethany and Alistair politely don’t call her out on the procrastination it is. Her horses are reshod, her bags packed twice, it’s a long journey across the Waking Sea.

On the third day, when Hawke is starting to wonder if maybe she should just stay dead instead, Bethany pulls her aside and sits her down.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” she says.

Hawke grimaces. “I hate stories.”

“You hate stories told by anyone but him,” Bethany counters, looking out the window to where her painfully small number of Wardens are training in the courtyard below. “They assigned Alistair to our group in the Deep Roads not long after you came back. They were scared about what your expedition had uncovered.”

“Surprisingly sensible.”

“Quite. And our leader, Stroud, he’d told us all about how this reinforcement we were getting was the man who’d saved the world alongside the Hero of Ferelden, like he was some made up sort of fairytale. I hated him before I’d even met him.”

“Sometimes,” Hawke says, sitting back in her chair, “you’re a lot like Carver.”

Bethany laughs; it’s been long enough that she can, now. “Actually, I’d planned to treat him like you treated Carver. You know, like he was placing a constant drain on your patience simply by existing.”

“Did you?”

“No. I took one look at him and fell in love.”

“You know, people don’t do that even in Varric’s terrible romance novels.”

“You are not the only Hawke, Marian. I do get to be strange and exceptional as well, from time to time.”

Reaching out, Hawke takes her sister’s hand, a stark contrast to her acerbic response. “Is there a point to this reminder that you’re sickeningly loved up?”

“Do you remember the day we met Varric?” Of course she does. Hawke doesn’t dignify that with a reply, so Bethany continues. “You looked at him with the same expression I had when I met Alistair.”

“Varric is an exceptionally good shot,” Hawke says, looking away. “I _really _like knowing how to kill people quickly. I was probably looking at his aim.”

“No,” Bethany says. She squeezes her hand gently. “You weren’t. Do you know what the difference between us and the two of you is, Hawke?”

“About two feet, four inches, if you’re taking it as a total.”

“We were already dying. We already knew not to waste time.”

Time.

They’ve been talking for four minutes and eleven seconds.

She isn’t in the Fade, she isn’t, she can’t be, this has to be real, only a really sadistic demon would torment her with her sister’s face and her best friend’s memory. Twelve. Thirteen. It’s real, it’s definitely real.

“Don’t waste time, Marian. No more. Please. All this time you have now...it’s a miracle. It’s a gift. Use it.”

Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. How many seconds has it been since she stepped back out of the Fade? How many minutes and hours and days has she spent not on a horse, riding to Kirkwall?

Shit.

\---

Hawke gets to the hills an hour outside of Kirkwall before she realises two things.

One, she isn’t sure if she’s even welcome home anymore. Will they arrest her? Kill her? Run screaming from her, yelling about how she’s clearly an undead fiend come back to haunt them? The last one is probably the most likely. She isn’t sure if that’s a comfort.

Two, she has no idea how she’s going to tell him. Whether she should tell him herself, or get someone else to do it, or write to him, or what. Aveline is there, still, and so is Merrill. Most of the others are long gone, and probably for the best, because most of the others would not take her coming back from the dead all that well. Fenris would probably just decapitate her without question.

Come to think of it, so would Aveline.

So Hawke decides to be careful. She swaps her hat for a hood, switches from her normal merchants’ boat to a smuggler’s skipper, comes into the docks and becomes an anonymous cloak amongst the masses. The evidence of the city reconstruction is everywhere, even here. It makes her realise, not for the first time, just how much of a mess she caused.

Hawke slips her way through into Darktown, using the tunnels to bring her through to Hightown without being seen. Of course, it’s not a simple journey, because no journey through Darktown is ever simple - and it’s comforting, really, to see that this simple fact hasn’t changed in the years she’s been away.

She takes out a pack of Carta thugs with a well-placed confusion grenade, barely having to do more than finish one of them off herself. When they’re dead, she drags the bodies into a pile and pays a boy to take a note to the Guard Captain. _ Present from an old friend. Darktown, under the western sewer entrance. _

The whole thing takes twenty seven minutes, forty two seconds.

It takes much longer to move through Hightown, because there everyone knows everyone. If the nobles think you’re a servant, the servants recognise that they don’t know you; if you dress like a noble, people eye you suspiciously. So Hawke just doesn’t let them see her.

Instead she takes advantage of the coming dusk and climbs up to the roof of the old Harriman estate, picking her way over the sturdiest tiles she can find. From here, she can see the Chantry - the ruins have been cleared away now, replaced with the slow process of rebuilding.

She braces herself, as if expecting it to hurt, as if remembering blood pouring between her fingertips and over her dagger. No; no, she doesn’t regret killing Anders. She doesn’t regret it at all. Maybe she should, but it’s impossible to when she’s perched on top of a roof, looking down at the building he destroyed. There are still flowers scattered where the Chanter’s board once stood, even now.

Slowly and laboriously and occasionally dangerously, Hawke picks her way across the rooftops. One hour, two minutes, thirty six seconds. It’s easy to count, now; her heart is beating a triplet every second. Just like Varric used to shoot. One two three. One two three. One two three.

Hawke lands on top of her own house and watches, perched on the edge, like a gargoyle.

She loses count the moment she sees him leave the building, the absence of the right number like a falling lurch in her stomach.

\---

Sneaking into her own house is perhaps the strangest thing Hawke’s ever done.

What’s even stranger is that it looks almost exactly like she remembers it. A few things have changed, of course - Bodahn and Sandal’s things are no longer there, and a couple of bits of furniture have clearly been relaced, but by and large...it’s the same.

Aveline had once told her to clear her mother’s room out. Not immediately after she died, of course. Aveline is stern, not callous. In fact in many ways she’s the kindest person Hawke has ever met. She just expresses in her own, uniquely Aveline manner.

“As long as that room remains there,” she’d said, “you’ll never move on. I know you miss her. I miss her. But Leandra would want you to move on.”

Padding through the hall, Hawke places her hand on the handle to mother’s room and takes a deep breath. She opens it - it hasn’t been touched. No - no, it has. But only to keep it perfectly clean, with no speck of dust, everything in the same place that Hawke had left it after the day she carried mother’s body home from that torture chamber.

She closes the door and all but runs to her own room.

It isn’t quite as pristine; the covers are rumpled, slept in, and as she gives in and presses her nose to them Hawke realises they smell of Varric. But her things are there, the ones she didn’t grab when she tried to draw the Chantry away from the city, leading them on a chase to avert the Exalted March that never came anyway.

Varric’s own things are in a single chest, carefully placed so as to disturb nothing of hers. Wincing, Hawke leaves the room without so much as touching anything and dares to make her way downstairs.

Beside the desk is an open box, filled with neatly stacked letters - all addressed to her. She pulls one only far enough to see the name, then returns it to its place. The desk itself, then, is covered with Varric’s own correspondence. She shouldn’t read it.

Hawke picks up the topmost sheet - the back page of a longer letter.

\---

_ Come on, Varric. We both knew how much of a mess we always were. It’s what made us so great. You can’t give up on it now. It all worked out okay in the end, right? _

_ We can go to Antiva City again. To that restaurant with the dumplings you liked. Remember the place we stayed there, with the balcony? You were always so terrible at being quiet. I miss that. _

_ I miss you. _

_ B _

\---

A vicious, tense dent crumples through the paper as Hawke grits her teeth and clenches her fingers. She realises her mistake straight away - the paper was pristine save for its horizontal fold before, and now there’s an unruly crease diagonally across it. She places it back on the table and begins, a little frantically and even more angrily, to smooth it out.

The lock in the front door clicks.

_ Fuck. _

There’s no time to finish fixing the letter or even to put it back in precisely the right spot. There’s a clear line of vision from the front door to her, and she's got to break it quickly.

On instinct, Hawke leaps, planting her boot on the chair by the desk and leaping up to the mezzanine. Three steps in one second, like the triplet beating in her heart, and she's at the window she left open. Her feet land on the exterior ledge just as the front door closes.

"Orana? That you?"

The sound of his voice makes her chest tighten, stealing the breath that no longer helps her count the seconds. It's going too fast, coming too irregularly.

"Huh," Varric says, when no reply comes. He's at the desk now, putting down a bottle, looking at…

_ Shit. _

Casually, Varric reaches behind him and draws the treacherous crossbow. "You know," he remarks idly, "stealing is one thing, but leaving muddy prints on the furniture? Not cool, kiddo."

Hawke leans back in the window, watching him in the reflection of the ridiculous chandelier. It's hard to tell, but it looks like his eyes are darting about. He might not have spotted her. But the window is wide open; it's only a matter of time.

She looks behind herself for a way of escape. She could try and make the jump to next door, but in all likelihood, without a run up, she’d just fall - but it’s only a dozen feet or so. Maybe she’d survive. There’s nothing there, she could land, roll...

“Look. You’re probably sitting there thinking hey, I’ve picked a real bad house to rob. And sure. You have. But Bianca and I are feeling merciful. So why don’t you just give back whatever it is you’ve taken, and I won’t have to fill you with arrows. Seem fair?”

There’s a tension in his voice. She’s heard it once before, when they were talking to Bartrand about - well, anything after the idol was in his brother’s hands. It isn’t any one emotion - just the presence of emotion at all, where normally Varric’s voice is a lie just like hers, smooth and cocky and neutral.

Her heart beats a tattoo in her throat. She’s lost count. She’s lost count again. How does she know this is real?

A creak sounds. He’s reached the third step from the top, it has to be, this is her house, she knows it. Any further and he’ll see her. Hawke’s fingers slip into the pouch on her hip. One second. Two.

She throws the smoke powder in front of her and tries the jump.

\---

“I just can’t believe you’re alive! Or that you’re here. In my little house again. I’m sorry about the mess. You’d think I would’ve taken care of it by now, but there’s a lot of them to look after, you see, it’s amazing how much the clan did for them before and - ooh, Hawke, don’t move, I can see the bone wriggling.”

Hawke grimaces. “Great. Wonderful.”

Matter of factly, and without any warning whatsoever, Merrill places one hand on her knee, the other under her ankle, and snaps the fractured bone back into place. There isn’t even time for Hawke to scream, but she does it anyway, just for good measure.

“Sorry,” Merrill says sheepishly, beginning to clean up the worst of the blood. “I broke my arm once, falling down Sundermount, and the Keeper warned me when she was going to do that, and I wish she hadn’t, you know, because I knew what was coming and that just made it so much worse.”

“Thanks,” Hawke says hoarsely, checking her teeth for cracks. It’d be just her luck to lose a tooth by biting down too hard. “I think.”

“So! What happened?”

One day, Hawke hopes, Varric will tell this story and it’ll sound a lot more heroic. To her, it just sounds like she’s tired. Because she is. Tired and, now, with a broken leg to go with her sewn up ribcage. She’s got to stop breaking herself. Anders isn’t here to magic it better anymore.

Merrill listens at first with her mouth hanging open, and then with tea, and then with a series of gentle _ ooh_s and _ aah_s and _ oh, Hawke! _

“Did you go to the wedding? I can’t believe I missed it.”

“Oh, yes. It was lovely. Aveline and I took Varric, we don’t think he would’ve gone otherwise, he’d only just gotten back and - oh, you’ve seen them, haven’t you? Tell me you’ve seen them. Of course you have. You wouldn’t have come to me first.”

“Technically,” Hawke says carefully, “I have _ seen _ Varric.”

For the first time, Merrill frowns. “Hawke...how did you break your leg?”

“I jumped out of a window of the estate.”

“What estate?”

“Mine.”

“Ooh. Oh. _ Oh. _He doesn’t know you’re alive?”

“Not precisely. He thinks someone was trying to steal from him.”

With a flick of her slender hand, Merrill slaps Hawke on the back of the head. “I swear, Hawke, sometimes you’re a bigger idiot than I am!”

“Ow,” Hawke grumbles, rubbing the sore spot. She tries not to think about the mysterious brown something that flakes from her hair as she does. “I didn’t know how to tell him. What am I supposed to do, just walk up and knock on the door?”

“You’re definitely not supposed to break into his house! Your house. Oh, this is so stupid. Wait here. Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to get Aveline.”

Hawke looks down at the still wide open laceration in her leg. “Don’t you need to sew this up?”

Amidst a clatter of mess, Merrill produces a needle and thread and presses them into her hands. “Your sewing is so much neater than mine,” she says sweetly, before running out of the house.

\---

“Hawke,” Aveline says for the fifth time, staring at her with her head in her hands, “you’re alive.”

Seven minutes, twenty three seconds.

Hawke nods.

“She hasn’t told Varric,” explains Merrill, passing out another round of tea. She’s particular about which cup she gives to Hawke, which confuses the human woman until she brings the cup to her lips and tastes the brandy lacing the drink.

_ Oh Merrill, you hero. _

“And I bet she’s the thief Varric just reported to my guardsmen, too,” Aveline says in an accusatory tone that rings with certainty. "And the one who killed the pack of Carta thugs in Darktown."

“It could be worse,” Hawke says, looking at the ceiling. “I could’ve sent Varric some goats and a bushel of wheat. Or was it sheep? I forget.”

“Hawke. You have to go to him.”

Taking another gulp of spiked tea, Hawke sighs. “I know.”

“We can take you there!” Merrill calls cheerily, before looking again at Hawke’s leg. “Oh, wait.”

Rolling her eyes, Aveline pats Hawke’s broken leg and stands. “There’s a healer in the Gallows. A few of the mages have come back since the new Divine ascended. I’ll get her.”

\---

Once the healer has been the next morning, Aveline and Merrill also insist on giving Hawke a bath and neatening her hair up. It’s not back to its old self, because she doesn’t feel like she is, but at least it no longer looks like she took the hedge she’d been dragged through backwards and put it on as a toupee.

Her clothes they leave the same, though Aveline confiscates her hat, citing it as a crime against all that is good and holy.

And then, twelve hours and eight minutes and nine seconds later, Hawke finds herself standing on the streets of Hightown, Aveline and Merrill on either side of her, looking at the family crest that hasn’t moved from the doorway.

“Fuck,” she says, or rather breathes, drawing the word out over three whole seconds.

"Wait here," Aveline says, "and keep your hood up."

As if Hawke would be stupid enough to show her face in Kirkwall. It's early, and the streets aren't too full yet, but Hightown is the worst place for her. She's not yet seen someone on the street that she doesn't recognise from one of mother's parties.

Varric answers the door quickly, and doesn't look surprised to see Aveline - at least, as far as Hawke manages to glimpse before she quickly looks directly at the floor.

"Guard Captain," Varric says with false cheeriness. "Daisy? What's the reunion for."

"Merrill has caught your thief," replies Aveline, before quickly adding, "in a manner of speaking."

Hawke doesn't need to be looking up to tell that Varric is looking at her. She can feel his eyes burning into her skin. Her chin is pressed right against her chest now, concealing her face entirely.

"I'm surprised you bought them back here. Cells full? It's been a bad week again, hasn't it. Look, I'll up my payments to the mercenary companies, see if they'll help a bit more."

"Varric, do you trust me?"

He narrows his eyes up at Aveline. "Guard Captain, no one in the history of ever has asked that question without a surprise coming after it."

"Not surprise," Aveline mutters. "Bloody miracle." She looks directly at him. "Would I ever lie to you?"

"Not knowingly. Look, just tell me what's going on, I'd like to get some sleep and-"

Merrill pulls Hawke's hood down.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

"Hi."

"...hi."

\---

At some point in the eleven and a half seconds it takes to bundle Hawke into her own house, Aveline and Merrill disappear. Hawke is vaguely aware that they don't do this without saying something to Varric, but the words are lost in her steady yet frantic counting of the seconds.

One two three. Two two three. Three two three. She's all triplets around him, like she's the arrow and he's the bow.

"Sit down."

His voice is gruff in a way Hawke definitely doesn't recognise at all. She doesn’t want to know what it means, so she sits in the chair that he points to. They’re not in the living room - they’re in the library, where she told Gamlen that mother was dead. It seems fitting.

“Explain.”

Varric doesn’t sit down so much as fall into his chair. She’s lifted her head now, enough to see that he’s not looking at her at all, and she thinks he might not have done since the moment he realised who she was.

Hawke explains.

It’s not like telling Aveline or Merrill was. It’s not even like telling Bethany and Alistair. Because Varric interrupts her - constantly, in that same gruff and empty tone, demanding details that she barely even realises she remembers. 

When they were in Kirkwall the first time round, he would do this whenever she went out without him. That was rare, but it happened once or twice, when he was in guild meetings or she was too rushed to pick him up from Lowtown. Only when it happened back then, his questions were jovial or mischievous, or at the very least just made with a grin, not a frown. It hurts.

But she answers each jagged question without any of her own in return. Yes, she thought she was going to die. Yes, she knew what she was doing. Yes, of course she did it because it was her sister’s fucking fiancé and no, the Inquisitor didn’t force her into it and yes, she did survive just by luck and yes, she had to crawl through the Fade hiding from demons until she found a rift and yes, she was bloody lucky it came out in the Western Approach and not somewhere without any Inquisition presence.

His last question comes after forty-five seconds of silence.

“What were you doing in the house?”

“I didn’t know how to say hello.”

“Most people try hello, Hawke.”

“Most people who can say hello haven’t been buried.”

“...yeah.”

One. Two. Three. Four.

The chair creaks as Varric shifts in it. “What’re you doing?”

“Huh?”

“You’re tapping. On your leg.”

Ten. Eleven. Twelve. She is tapping. She’s never realised that she was doing that before. Fuck. Can she stop? Twenty. Twenty-one.

Hawke closes her eyes, twitches her fingers, and doesn’t look at him when she opens them again. _ Don’t waste time. The time you have is a miracle. _That’s why she has to count it. She’s been counting even more since Bethany said it, and maybe that’s when she started tapping too, maybe this isn’t because she’s scared of being in the Fade but because she’s scared Varric isn’t here.

“If I stop counting,” she says, still tapping, still aware of the rising number, still aware of the one-two-three of her heartbeat, “I won’t know whether time has passed or not.”

Her voice cracks, and maybe that’s why Varric gets out of his chair, moving to stand beside her, his fingertips tracing the arm of the chair, inches from her elbow.

Quietly, without the gruff and abrasive force of his voice, Varric asks, “Why does that matter?”

“Time doesn’t pass in the Fade. Not in the same way. It wasn’t eight months for me, Varric.”

One. Two. Three. She gets to fifteen before he says anything. “Everyone you’ve seen,” he says softly, “has wanted to know if it’s really you.”

“Yes.”

“We’re all so worried that you’re not real and - fuck, Hawke. Have you asked any of us if this is real?”

Hawke winces.

She hasn’t, she hasn’t and she’s needed to, needed it so badly, needed -

Gently, Varric takes hold of the hand she’s using to tap on her leg. At first he just slips his fingers between her thumb and the rest of her hand - when she freezes still, he laces his fingers with hers and holds on tightly. She tries to tap with the other hand, and he grabs that one too, not interlacing but just pressing it down against her thigh.

“How do I prove it?” he asks, eyes locking with hers. “How do I convince you that you don’t need to count?”

Hawke screws her face up, but it doesn’t stop the tears. “Tell me a story.”

“Which one?”

“Yours.”

“Hawke…”

_ “Please, _Varric.”

\---

Varric pulls her by the hands until she’s sat on the floor, in front of the fire that is all that makes the Marcher winter bearable. He keeps hold of her hands as he pulls her to his side, wrapping one arm around her and holding her against him.

For a while, this is all Hawke can focus on, even though he’s explaining everything that happened after she didn’t die. Even though his voice is soft and warm and rich and Maker, he’s so much better at telling this than Bethany and Alistair were.

The thing is that Varric has never done casual physical contact. That was Isabela’s remit, and Merrill’s, and Bethany's when she was there. Varric didn’t hide from it at all costs like Fenris did, but he didn’t initiate it either; the most they’d ever touched was when they were trying to claw their way out of the Deep Roads with just them and Aveline, because the Wardens had already taken Bethany away.

If she can replace it with resting her head on Varric’s shoulder and feeling his arm tight against her back, Hawke thinks, she might just manage to stop counting.

She doesn’t interrupt him, like he did her. Not until he starts to tell her about Bianca, and then she can’t help the questions that tumble out of her, until he’s told her everything about them, not just the end. Hawke holds onto his hands tightly through every single word that she makes him tear from his chest.

By the time he’s told her about Divine Victoria and the places everyone from the Inquisition has gone and the building work on the Chantry, Hawke can feel herself drifting off. She hadn’t slept well the night before, with her leg still broken and her fingers tapping a careful count.

“You know,” Varric says, his chest rumbling in her ear, “I don’t tell stories about myself. You finally get me to, and what do you do? Fall asleep on me. Nice job, Chuckles. You know how to make a man feel important.”

“Sorry.”

“You know, I stayed up all night trying to work out what you’d stolen.”

She laughs, curling tighter against him. “I broke my leg jumping out of the window. Merrill set the bone, but it didn’t get healed until this morning.”

“Right,” Varric says, looking levelly at her. “Come on.”

He pulls her to her feet and through the house, all the way up to her bedroom, not letting go of either of her hands. It’s awkward as they ascend the stairs and more awkward still when they’re standing next to the bed, looking at each other.

“Varric. I’m real.”

He takes a deep breath and lets go.

For four minutes and fifty seven seconds.

Until the two of them are clustered under the covers, holding onto each other for the sake of all reality, clawing their way to sleep with intertwined fingers.

\---

It isn’t until they’ve woken up, broken the news that she’s alive to Orana, and had dinner that Hawke realises she’s still wasting time.

Whenever he’s not touching her she can’t help but keep counting, so Varric doesn’t let go of her hand for longer than he has to. They joke about it, because that’s their armour. _ “Maker, Hawke, are you going to count how long I’m in the privy?” _ and _ “If I’d known you were so sentimental I’d have tried to set you up with my sister.” _

Eventually they’re sitting on the steps, looking down at the main hall, hands held together at their sides. Varric has sat himself on the step one higher than her, putting their heads level with one another. Wherever she looks, she’s aware of his eyes.

“Varric,” she says, after a freeingly unknown amount of time, “if I hadn’t died, would you still have broken up with Bianca?”

He looks at her with lips slightly parted, the distant firelight flickering over his jaw. “If you hadn’t died, I would have broken up with her faster.”

The triplets in her heart become a rat-a-tat-tat.

“Oh.”

Fingertips ghost over the far side of her face, and Hawke realises what is coming before it happens, feels a desperate need to count the seconds even though he’s holding her hand. The demons give you all the things you want, this could be fake, this could be -

Varric’s lips are warm, and the skin around his mouth is rough with stubble. Hawke stops counting seconds, starts counting kisses, one and two and three and now the kisses she’s counting are steps, now they’re pieces of clothing landing on the ground, now they’re feather-light touches and whimpers and creaks that the mattress makes as they stumble clumsily into the bed.

“Are you real?” Varric asks, resting his forehead against the quillback scars on her abdomen. “Tell me you’re real, Chuckles.”

Hawke slowly and deliberately unties the ponytail at the back of his head, letting his hair tumble down to tickle her skin. She remembers Wicked Grace and pitchers of ale and cards she couldn’t possibly have drawn.

“You let me win that game,” she realises aloud, laughing so much that her whole body shakes. “When I beat you and Isabela. The only time I beat you. You card count, you had to have known I didn’t have the Knight of Roses. You let me win.”

Tears splash against her skin, but Varric just sighs, then lets his sigh become a laugh, his hands roaming back over her skin. She goes back to counting touches, counting laughter, counting freckles on his arms and back.

“Tell me you’re real,” Hawke says, when he holds her in his lap, back against the pillows, one hand at her waist and the other holding her cheek.

Varric kisses her, once on the lips and three, four, five times along the other side of her face, pressing his lips to her ear. “The night before the wedding, I filled Bethany’s room with all the books Isabela used to read. I put dog treats on her pillow and flowers all over the floor and found your grandmother’s ring hidden in the house for them to use in the ceremony.

“She stormed into my room the next day. ‘Varric!’ she screeched. ‘What in Andraste’s name is all of this! Why have you done all these ridiculous things?’ So I smiled at her and I said, ‘Well, Sunshine, someone had to do it. Your sister isn’t here to, and you know she would have.’”

Hawke splays her fingers at the back of Varric’s skull, pulls his head against her neck by tugging on his hair, her other arm wrapping tight around his shoulders. “What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. She cried, and took my hand, and didn’t let go of it until I’d walked her all the way down the Chantry aisle. I’m real, Chuckles.”

\---

There are many more seconds that come after that.

Hawke doesn’t count any of them.


End file.
